Yahoo! YUI! project! is! no! more!

The world overtook us, yet AGAIN says Purple Palace

Yahoo! has announced that its Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) project is redundant in the age of node.js and better browsers.

The library has been a project in the Purple Palace since 2005, the web giant says, and has been out in public since 2006. While some of its techniques – its modules and dynamic loading, for example – escaped the fold and became popular developer techniques, the library itself never became a must-have.

Nor has it been so strongly supported by Yahoo! itself: there hasn't been a major iteration of the library since YUI3 in 2009.

In this post, Julien Lecomte, director of engineering at Yahoo! Presentation Technologies announces the decision to discontinue the project.

The entire Web ecosystem and architecture is not what it was nine years ago: Lecomte cites not just the success of node.js as a YUI-killer, but also the growth of stable and well-used package managers that enable the third-party open source “single purpose” tools to play nice together; better build tools and application frameworks; and improving standardisation.

“Finally, browser vendors are now committed to making continuous improvements to their web browsers while aligning more closely with standards. With so called 'evergreen web browsers', which are making it easier for users to run the latest stable version of a web browser, we can expect a significant reduction in the amount of variance across user agents”, the post adds.

From now on, Lecomte writes, the only work on YUI will be to deliver “targeted fixes that are absolutely critical to Yahoo properties.” ®